Lindgren denied crossing the 100-foot buffer and said Suarez’s wife, Misty, yelled at him. A county deputy drove out to the site at Rosewood Rehabilitation and Care Center and made sure the candidates and campaign workers were following the law.

“You run for office and you’re showing you can’t follow a little line?” an incredulous Suarez said as he and Misty sat in a truck-bed while Deputy Sam Presas dutifully measured the 100-foot radius to make sure everyone understood where the line was.

The deputy left without issuing any citations and all seemed well with the world. But one of Suarez’s critics, George Richel, told me yesterday he thought it was very interesting that the mayor was concerned about candidates talking to voters near polling places. Because a few hours after the deputy had left, Richel saw Suarez inside a different polling place at Converse City Hall, sitting with a voter and holding a sample ballot. Suarez was wearing a campaign T-shirt, but it was turned inside-out to hide the logo.

Richel, husband of Converse City Councilwoman Kathy Richel and no fan of Suarez, pulled out his cell phone and took a picture of the scene. “I’m just tired of him living by one set of rules and everybody else living by the law,” Richel told me. Richel emailed me the photo:

Suarez told me the voter was an elderly veteran who supported his campaign and needed help getting to the polling site. Suarez said he drove him there, but inside the building, the line of voters was long and the supporter was tired. Suarez said he grabbed a sample ballot and waited with the voter until the line shortened. Suarez said he wasn’t pressing him for his vote at the polling place — the voter was already a supporter — and he didn’t help him cast a ballot at the voting machine. (The Texas law that prohibits campaigning within the 100-foot buffer also prohibits photos and video.)

“If it was a total stranger, then I could see a big problem with that,” Suarez said. But the mayor said he already knew the man and was simply trying to be helpful.

“He said, ‘I don’t know if I’m going to be able to do this,'” Suarez said when asked why they were reading the sample ballot. “He was more worried about how to operate the machine.”

Bexar County Elections Administrator Jacquelyn Callanen said it’s OK for campaigns to drive supporters to poll sites but a candidate can’t wait inside. “They just can’t go in and sit there and wait,” she said. “They can’t loiter inside the poll site.”

Suarez said he sat down with the voter for only a few moments. “Not even 15 seconds,” he said. Richel said it was more like five minutes.

After taking a picture of Suarez and the voter, Richel started taking video outside the building and waited for Suarez to come out of a bathroom. Things got testy when Suarez came out and the mayor accused Richel, who owns a bar, of gambling and accepting payoffs. (Richel emailed segments of the video to me. I edited the videos to correct the orientation and string them together. I left out the first few moments when both men use salty language that’s not fit for a family newspaper in Texas):

Richel: You’re not allowed in there, Al.

Suarez: They didn’t say nothin’ to me.

Richel: But you didn’t go in there and tell them who you were, did you? You didn’t do that? No. That’s why your shirt’s turned inside out, Al. You can’t be doing stuff like that. It’s cheating.

The video ends with Suarez getting in his car and Richel walking off. Afterwards, Suarez said the elderly voter came out and told him he was actually at the wrong polling place and couldn’t vote at Converse City Hall. Suarez drove him to his proper polling place at Judson Middle School, where the mayor said he waited outside while the voter finally cast his ballot.